


Of Night and Half-Light

by AnNee



Category: SPN
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-12 23:06:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1203880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnNee/pseuds/AnNee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After four years in Hell, Castiel grips Dean tight and raises him from perdition. Dean’s not the only earth-bound delivery that day. <br/>This was a last minute pitch-hit for the lovely iluvroadrunner6 for the spn_hetexchange 2011. Title courtesy of William Butler Yeats.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Night and Half-Light

  
_“I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher."_  
~ **William Butler Yeats**  


  
  
  
  
  
  
When Bela is thirteen, she watches a man walk into a primary school in Scotland and kill sixteen five-year-olds with a magnum revolver.   
  
She knows a lot, probably more than a thirteen year old should. She knows that some people were never, ever supposed to be parents. She knows that sometimes love isn’t blind as much as it just closes its eyes. She knows that sometimes, no matter how hard you try or believe or pray, it doesn’t make any difference at all. She knows how to scream without letting anyone hear a sound.   
  
But she had never known pure evil until that day.   
  
She sits on her parents’ couch and watches as mothers crumble in agony onto the pavement and flowers are laid down in a sea of grief that is pretty to look at, but won’t bring anyone back from the dead.   
  
She changes the channel before the BBC flashes the victims names. Names make it real, she thinks. Make faces human, and gives them souls.   
  
It’s something she’s carried with her since that day, a purposeful distance from it all. Evil exists no matter what you do. Bad things happen to perfectly good people, all the time, every day—with no rhyme or reason. Bela doesn’t believe in fate. She doesn’t believe in karma. She believes that life exists to test your limits, to screw you over—and stopping to smell the roses and learn each other’s names won’t ever change that. People can be called whatever they please.   
  
Just ask Abby Talbot.   
  
:::::  
  
 _White, buzz, burn is how her senses return.  
  
She imagines waking up like this is a lot like being born. Bright lights hit her first, glaringly loud and obnoxious, intruding through her closed eyes like they want to burn her retinas from the outside. There’s noise, a faint din of movement that seems like it’s being filtered through a tunnel. All echoes and octaves that she can’t quite place, the sound seeming to crest all at once and infiltrate her ears and fill her head to capacity until all she can hear is deafening white noise and then silence.   
  
She’s in a motel room. She can tell immediately, even though she doesn’t know the whys or whens, and she tries to open her eyes but they’re too heavy and the effort makes her drowsy for a minute. She takes a moment instead to feel her limbs, scanning a mental checklist derived from sometime before, when waking up like this was almost routine. It takes an anxious second for feeling to tingle back into every one. Legs: check. Arms: check. Fingers: one through ten. All accounted for, she tries to squeeze her eyes shut tighter, tries to cushion some of the lingering sound so she can focus on something more tangible; anything that gives her perspective, anything to latch onto other than noise, light, aches. She kind of revels in the dull throb that seems to radiate from her back teeth to her toes, soaking up every bone on its way down. Aches are good. Aches mean she isn’t dead.   
  
Tentatively, she cracks her eyes open; startlingly white beams fly under her radar and burn her pupils. Stifling a gasp, she blinks them shut again, trying squeeze the sting away. The noise is still loud in her head and her eyes are still bleary and stinging, so she’s unsure how long it takes for her to register the heavy weight of flesh that begins to bear down on her arm.   
  
“Miss! Miss, are you okay?”  
  
She shifts her arm, every instinct screaming at her to get away, to curl up—protect herself until she can make some kind of sense out of everything.  
  
“Should I call 911?”  
  
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she recognises voices. She grapples for faces and names to match them to, but comes up groggily blank.   
  
The last thing she hears before she falls back into darkness is a dispatch operator’s mumbled instructions.   
  
And just like that, Bela Talbot is saved. _  
  
:::::  
  
Bela heard names in the pit.  
  
The things they did, the things they were capable of; the things they had planned for the war—for the reckoning. In the beginning, she tried to place faces to those names: twisted lips, strong jaws, black eyes. Bela knew she was fooling herself even as she imagined. Evil could look however it wanted up there. She’d seen it wear blond curls, kind eyes, trusting hands. You can never, ever tell. Not for certain. Trust no one. It’s what she’s always lived by.  
  
Their name was infamous. It came and went, but its presence never wavered. So much so that her memory of them had started to blur—second-guessing the clear picture of them she still had in her head, almost ludicrous to compare the hearsay she was hearing to their appearance in the flesh. And then soft lips and shy eyes and handsome lines appeared before her as he took his place beside her rack.  
  
And Bela knew she wouldn’t ever be forgetting again.   
  
:::::  
  
 _It only takes two days for them to find her.  
  
She blames rusty PI skills and a pretty severe concussion for the security breach and inwardly scolds herself for nearly collapsing in relief at the sight of someone who can possibly help make sense of it all—even if that someone is Bobby Singer.   
  
“Hiya Bela.”   
  
Bela pauses in the doorway, a pharmacy bag clutched against her side. She doesn’t have any money. No ID to access any of her accounts; she doesn’t even know if any of them are still there to be activated. No car, no house, no contact lists—no real burning need for any of them.   
  
She pickpocketed some guy’s wallet two days ago to book the room. When those funds run low, she can lift another. Money has never been an issue for her; it’s comforting to know that some things haven’t changed.   
  
“Bobby.”   
  
Sam is leaning on the table next to the window. Ankles crossed, arms folded. She knows he’s armed—he has to be—but it makes her uneasy that the gun isn’t pointed at her forehead. She thinks that says more about her, for some reason.  
  
“Sam.”   
  
Sam nods, a subtle tilt of his chin, and the unease settles slightly. Okay, so apprehensive, but not outright alarmed. Clearly her homecoming isn’t front page news—which makes her wonder just what she’s missed out on.   
  
They’re still watching her, stoic, silent, as she clicks the door shut—throws the key onto the table beside the door, just to have something to listen to. Just to make a noise.   
  
“What’s in the bag?” Bobby asks, nodding towards her arms where the bag is still clutched protectively.   
  
“Lady products.” She smirks, immediately. “Why? Are you having a heavy flow day too?”  
  
It’s actually twenty dollars’ worth of candles and two canisters of salt. She bought the Ouija board at a toy store down the street this morning. She hadn’t stuck around at the hospital to hear the doctor’s explanation; X-rays weren’t going to show anything she couldn’t predict with a few candles and the alphabet.   
  
“Glad to know Hell hasn’t dampened your wit.” Bobby smirks back and she tightens her grip, her throat closing on a swallow.   
  
“It takes more than hellfire to keep a good woman down,” she retorts. She’ll play the game, trade the barbs—the whole world’s a charade. She still remembers how it works.   
  
“I’ve got to say, though…” She keeps her gaze trained on them, unwavering, as she tilts her head playfully. She still remembers how fast a hunter can disarm when he wants to; she found that out the hard way. “This isn’t much of a homecoming party. How did you find me?”  
  
It sounds nonchalant but she really is curious. Wondering why they’d even been looking in the first place.   
  
“Wasn’t that hard,” Bobby replies, sliding a glance over to Sam.   
  
“We were doing a nationwide search on unusual events on the 18th of September. Turns out, a girl was found in the Erie Motel in Pennsylvania two days ago.” Sam picks up a piece of paper that’s resting on the table beside his thigh and holds it up. A mock sketch of a woman stares back at her. “No memory, no injuries—there was even a sketch.” He glances at the picture and then looks at Bela and raises an eyebrow. “It’s a pretty good likeness, don’t you think?”   
  
“What do you want, Sam?” She hasn’t slept and her bones ache. There’s a ringing in her ears that hasn’t let up in two days and her façade is beginning to slip. She’ll crawl back into the pit herself before she lets a Winchester see her break.   
  
Sam puts the paper back on the table and looks her dead in the eye. “I want you to show me the scar.”   
  
The bag falters in her arms, and she wants to take a halting step backwards but her feet won’t move. “Excuse me?”   
  
Sam doesn’t twitch. “The scar. The hand print. Where is it?”   
  
It’s on her hip, actually. A burning red imprint that she’d stared at for three hours in the grimy motel mirror this morning. It hasn’t given up any answers yet.  
  
She narrows her eyes, steps forward, tries to calculate the time it will take to grab the key and get the door open if she has too. Probably more time than it takes for a hunter to disarm.   
  
“And how do you know about…”  
  
“Because I have one, too.”   
  
Bela gasps, a shuddering, choking intake of breathe as all the air is sucked from her lungs at the familiar voice cutting through the room.   
  
She spins on her heel, watches him step away from the wall he’s been resting against, feels the bag give way in her slackened grasp, feels herself breaking. Right before their eyes.   
  
“Hi, Bela.” Dean Winchester smirks as candles and salt hit the floor with a clatter. _  
  
:::::  
  
Bela has always been more of a spectator, really. It’s why she doesn’t have many friends. The reason she usually sat by herself at lunchtimes at school. She’s an observer. It’s her thing. She watches people, their habits, their secrets; their net worth. She watches them now: the push and pull of their little existence. Three weeks and she knows more about these people than she knows about anyone she’s ever met.   
  
She wonders how much they think they know about her.   
  
:::::  
  
 _The toy-store Ouija points them to Pamela. Pamela points them to Castiel and then gets her eyes burnt out while her hand is still pressed against Bela’s hip.  
  
It should probably shake Bela more than it does, but then, that’s nothing new. Ever since she got back, nothing is how it should be. She probably shouldn’t still flinch every time someone brushes against her—but she does.  
  
If anyone notices, they don’t say. But then, that’s nothing new either.   
  
“You know you’re in this now,” Bobby says to her, pretty dismissively. He’s just come back from some suicide mission with Dean, talking about summons and angels and God. Sam disappeared hours ago and hasn’t come back yet—and Bobby is staring at her over their books like they’re on the same page, like she has any idea what’s happening anymore. “Now’s about the time to decide who you’re in this with.” Bobby stares harder, pointedly. He needn’t have bothered; Bela heard what he was asking.  
  
She’s been alive for three days now. She has an unexplained scar that she’s pretty sure an angel gave her, and she’s being asked to ally herself to the thing that spent the last two decades flaying her alive.  
  
Nothing’s how it should be anymore. That’s probably why she finds herself nodding.  
  
“Yes. I suppose it is.”_  
  
:::::  
  
Sam takes his coffee with cream and two sugars and, if they happen to be in a coffee house, a shot of anything sweet and syrupy. His brother calls him a girl after his first sip—every cup, every time. He can absorb an entire book of Latin prophecy in under six hours, but he always goes back at the end to reread the very first passage before commenting aloud, to the entire room, that he’s done. His brother calls him a geek—every book, every time. He wears his feelings loudly; in every mannerism, in every gesture for anyone to see or hear. He doesn’t apologise for it, and it drives his brother crazy.   
  
She thinks it’s because it reminds him of their mother.  
  
:::::  
  
 _They don’t talk about it.  
  
Dean Winchester has always had a habit of keeping his cards pretty close to the chest. Bela keeps hers closer. It subsequently means that anything that should be talked about and worked through in a healthy and logical manner gets hashed out in other ways.   
  
Dean drinks so heavily that an air of whiskey follows him around like a storm cloud. Bela plays with Vicodin like they’re popping candies. They have barely-lucid sex that they don’t talk about either. They push at each other, scratch and bruise so it marks. They fit their hands over each other’s fading scars, their matching seals, and press and press and press. In those times, they say more with their hands and their tongues and their teeth than they’ll ever be able to bring themselves to say with words.   
  
It’s a cycle, really. But between the hunts and the flashbacks and the angels and the seals—they’d be foolish to find time to break out of it. _  
  
:::::  
  
Dean is different. His movements are measured, honed with the constraint of everything he wants to say; everything he knows but can’t let himself believe.   
  
He can reload a gun in four seconds, smooth and quick and graceful. He can shoot a moving target at 50 paces, a dead bull’s-eye—every shot, every time. He takes his coffee black: no sugar, no cream, and scalding hot. Sam rolls his eyes when he sips it noisily from the cup—every sip, every time.   
  
Bella likes tea. Strong, and English—preferably with honey, but she’s mostly drunk coffee for the last two weeks. Partly because she doesn’t sleep much anymore, partly because honey isn’t necessarily on her grocery list these days.  
  
She wonders if they know that. She wonders if they’d ever paid attention when she’d spooned it into her cup the mornings they ate breakfast crammed into diner booths—exhausted and irritable. She doubts it.   
  
:::::  
  
 _Bela trusts Crowley more than she trusts Castiel. She tells Dean this and he snorts. “Figures,” is all he says, but it doesn’t hold the venom it would have once upon a time. Bela can feel the winds changing, but she doesn’t know what it means.  
  
There’s no one to tell if she figures it out, anyway.  
  
“He knows too much,” she says once, after Castiel has departed on a gust of wind and shadow and left a pile of Bobby’s research a scattered mess across the floor.   
  
Dean turns to her from where he’s staring at the place Castiel just vacated. “What do you mean? Of course he knows too much—he’s an angel.”  
  
He is, of course; she knows this. But something about him has never sat right with her.   
  
It’s partly because she still doesn’t know why he saved her, of all people.   
  
It’s wholly because, when she’d outright asked him, he’d stared right through her and then reached out and laid his hand against her skin. “Because you, Bela Talbot, are more important to this Earth than you could realise.”   
  
Like she said.   
  
She doesn’t trust the guy. _  
  
:::::  
  
Bobby has a tin of tea leaves stashed in the cupboard beside the fridge. She doesn’t know how long they’ve been there, or who they were intended for—she found them last night, insomnia chasing her from the couch and no Jim Beam nearby. Dean walked in while she was staring into the tin and cleared his throat.   
  
He announces his presence like that a lot - even though she’d had no choice, really, but to adjust to him being there. Bobby’s house isn’t that big, and it never really matters if he’s in the next room, or out in the yard, or in another state. She closes her eyes and he’s close as he wants. She thinks she’s starting to forget a lot of it, though—things are blurring. Blending into one muddy stream of cries and gargles and white-hot burning, and she doesn’t think that’s right. It’s probably a blessing, though; Bela always used to think those were what poor people counted to make themselves richer, but there you go.   
  
“What’s in the tin?”  
  
Three weeks ago, the sound of his voice made her skin turn cold. Now it almost sounds like just another voice.   
  
“Tea.” Her voice sounds exactly the same as it always has. But they both are, really. Despite the nightmares and the hand prints and the guilt—they’re the same people. One got off the rack; one didn’t. But none of it was for lack of trying.   
  
Bela has never claimed to be a martyr. She never wanted to be a hero. She’s the same person. She hasn’t changed that much.   
  
“I didn’t know you were one for stereotypes.” His lips twitch, and Bela pulls her eyes away from his bare feet to look at his face.  
  
He doesn’t have dark eyes, or twisted lips, or even blond curls. He’s guarded; everything about him is. He has green eyes and soft lips. He looks exactly like he did then. Back when he was the one tearing flesh, breaking bones and listening to the screams.   
  
“There’s a lot you don’t know, I imagine.”   
  
They bicker. It’s who they are—they haven’t changed that much.   
  
Except they have. Everything has. And Bela’s about done pretending.   
  
:::::  
  
 _“I don’t really remember, you know.”  
  
They’re lying side by side, sweat drying sticky and cold on their skin under the motel’s shabby a/c. They don’t bother religiously with sheets nowadays—not like they used to. Sam knows better than to walk in unannounced, and somewhere along the line, they stopped using their flesh as weapons in this push and pull battle they’ve manufactured. Now, they can look all they want. Now, mostly, it’s theirs to looks at.   
  
Dean shifts up on his elbow, reaches out a finger to run a shaky path across her clavicle just to watch her shiver. “Nothing?”  
  
She shrugs her shoulder and the finger slips away. “Flashes, maybe. Sometimes I dream. But not as much as I think I should. Not anymore.”  
  
Dean’s eyebrows almost jump off his head. “You _want _to remember?”  
  
“Maybe.” She meets his eyes, because they only ever tell the truth when they’re sticky and cold and tangled in sheets. It’s like some unspoken trade off that’s not quite as tawdry as prostitution, but probably twice as dangerous. “I wish I could remember more. Sometimes.”  
  
Truth: She wants to remember so she can help him forget.  
  
The bed dips as he drops back against the pillows. The subtle humming of the a/c clicks off as the unit splutters and fails. “I wish I could forget. Always.”  
  
Lie: He doesn’t want to forget. She wouldn’t be lying beside him if he did._  
  
:::::   
  
Bela has known evil in so many forms since that night when she was thirteen.   
  
Blond curls and kind eyes and trusting hands had all touched her in her time in the pit. Torn her flesh, broken her bones, listened to her scream. And for a moment, those eyes had been green, and those hands had been strong, and rough and guarded.   
  
She catches those hands now, across the room, helping Bobby measure salt and herbs and provisions in the kitchen. His eyes, green as they’d been then, aren’t really paying attention to their movements. They’re flicking to his brother, across the room—as he continues reading aloud from the book he has spread open on Bobby’s rickety table.   
  
:::::  
  
 _By the time she’s sixteen, Bela knows how to recognise a hunter before they utter one word, set one foot in her space.  
  
By the time she’s eighteen, she knows how to undress one with her eyes shut, just as quick as she’s learned to shoot a gun. Jacket, holster, wrist strap, belt buckle, first pistol, second pistol, pants, pocket knife. Some look at her with shocked curiosity as she tosses the weapons aside with a slow, slick flick of her wrist before dropping her skirts. Then their eyes trace her scars, tiny flecks of imperfection marring the otherwise smooth expanse of skin, the secret shadows emanating from her eyes as realisation finally dawns.   
  
Not a mole, not a demon—just another girl caught up in another life, with her own Daddy issues, her own suicide mission—her own reasons that hunters will never understand any more than she could ever understand theirs. At eighteen, their world is her playground. She can play them as easily as the girls back home had played hopscotch. Bela knows pride holds no value in survival. That “altruistic” is far too wordy for a tombstone. Truth was, they made it all far too easy for her, really.   
  
No one argues the worth when it’s revenge that’s clouding the price-tag. No one questions the cost when the payoff is brushing their fingertips.   
  
Bela should know that better than anyone.   
  
She undresses him like she undressed the others—but it’s different. Everything’s different now, she supposes. Sixty years in hell and the whole god damn world changes. Go figure.   
  
“We’ve just saved a seal using a three thousand year old weapon of Heaven and you didn’t try to auction it,” he grunts as she shifts her weight, pushes towards him and they’re moving—flipping, her back slamming against the shabby wall of the motel. His fingers readjust against the slick skin of her thighs. He looks startled for a second and then he grins, wide and flushed. “I’m impressed.”  
  
She shrugs, her breath coming in shallow pants now that they’re moving again. “With my morals or my core muscles?” she asks, and his chuckle rumbles all the way through her.   
  
“Both,” he assures her, the word mumbled against her lips. “Definitely.”   
  
They’re down to forty-nine seals and still don’t know exactly what role they have in this apocalypse play yet, but they’re kidding themselves if they think this is going to end well.   
  
Bella should know that better than anyone. _  
  
:::::  
  
A month into this now, and things are starting to unravel. Something’s closing in; they just aren’t sure what. A clock is ticking somewhere; they just don’t know how to stop it.   
  
She looks back down at the tarot cards as Sam’s voice continues to fill the room. _The seals are known in various cultures; often in contradicting ways… The first record of such a seal was derived from the ancient prophet…_  
  
Sam. The boy king. The beginning of the end. The name that never went unspoken, that was never, ever argued against in all her time down there. His eyes aren’t soft; they’re pliable. Floppy hair and gentle words and little boy smiles aren’t supposed to command an underworld army. They aren’t supposed to be able to pull at smoke like that.   
  
But nothing is the way it’s supposed to be anymore, she supposes.   
  
:::::::  
  
 _Bela Talbot has long since stopped believing in things like heroes.  
  
When she was very little, she used to make up stories about superheroes before she went to sleep. Superman would tap on her window. Batman would escort her home from school. James Bond would be her prom date one day.   
  
It was a game; a lark. Not for one second did she ever really believe that it bordered on reality.   
  
“Baddies are real,” she would tell her mother later, all doe eyes and soft curls, because at six years old, she knew that not all baddies lived in comic books. Some lived right out in the open. Some even tucked you in at night. “Monsters are real. Why not Superman?”  
  
Her mother never had answered her question. _  
  
:::::  
  
Her father would have laughed at her. Said she was being foolish. Letting her instincts overrule her common sense. _The sun also shines on the wicked, Abby,_ her father used to say; out of everyone, he would know. _Never forget that._ She had, somewhere along the line. It was easy to, being down there for so long. Seeing evil so pure and so unguarded that no one had to look for it. But the men before her now aren’t evil. She doesn’t know a lot anymore, but she knows that.   
  
_Don’t be a fool, Abigail,_ her father would have said. _Any idiot can see the truth._   
  
But his truths had always been so different from hers. The only truth they had ever shared had died along with him that day, and he isn’t here to see what she sees now. What she can see right in front of her eyes.   
  
She sometimes wonders what he would think of Dean. She wonders exactly what he would think of the woman Bela has become. She shouldn’t care, really—she’s never cared what anyone thought about her before—but she does.   
  
She does a lot of things she probably shouldn’t nowadays.   
  
  
:::::  
  
 _About a year ago now, Castiel sent Dean to the seventies and taught him all about destiny. He showed him his mother, showed him the truth—showed him all the lies he’d believed. Bela always thought destiny was for shit. She used to sell destiny to little old ladies for a thousand dollars a séance—once upon a time. It’s not that hard to get your head around, once you decide to believe it. If her parents weren’t her parents, she would never have made the deal. Without the deal, she would never have gone to Hell. If she’d never gone to Hell, Dean would have never sliced her open. Her blood would never have been spilt, the seal would never have been broken, and she would never have had to be brought back to close it back up again.  
  
According to destiny, Dean had lived to save the world; Sam had lived to try and end it. Before, Bela used to think that people could choose their own destiny.  
  
Now, she’s not so sure.  
  
Bobby’s still cold and twisted behind her, Dean’s still kneeling mangled and broken—she’s still bleeding out onto the patch of dry soil where Sam had just been and Bela decides she’d been wrong all along.   
  
If people can choose their own destiny, why the hell would anyone choose this one? _  
  
:::::  
  
Two weeks ago, Bobby sat across from her and asked her to make a decision. To make a choice, and be certain about it—because two weeks ago, they weren’t sure of much at all. Not even each other.   
  
Yesterday, Sam and Dean were in Missouri, throwing punches and torching a Rugaru. This morning, Dean found her alone at Bobby’s kitchen table, pulled up a chair, looked her in the eye, and told her how it is.   
  
They’ve been pulled out of Hell by an angel of God and no one knows why. His mother was a hunter and 26 years ago, a demon she dealt with bled into Sam’s mouth and gave him ESP. Ruby’s back—and nothing good can ever come of _that_.   
  
Bela’s seen Dean be many things. She’s seen him angry, desperate, irritated, cock-sure.  
  
She’s never seen him scared before. She doesn’t enjoy it as much as she should.  
  
“We need your help, Bela,” he’d said. And it’s the first certain thing she’s heard since she came back.   
  
Bela’s watched him twist a man’s head till it snapped. Plunge a knife into a woman’s chest. Burn a little girl till she screamed. She knows that he’s done far worse things than that, knows everything he’s capable of. Knows that everything he does, everything he’s done, he’s done for his family—for his brother. For the boy king—the beginning of the end. For everything he had been taught to hate. And he’d do it all again. For Sam. For love.   
  
Evil doesn’t do that. It can wear blond curls and falsely kind eyes, but it can’t do that. Of that, Bela is certain.   
  
So Bela will help him. She’ll do her part—whatever it is. If only to prove that Hell hasn’t gotten her, either. She can love. She can learn.   
  
“Okay.” And just like that—she makes a choice.  
  
::::::  
  
 _She sits in the back through three states—Bela is the last person to get bogged down with sentiment, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to slide into the passenger seat when Dean hesitatingly dragged the doors open back in Lawrence.  
  
Castiel appears while they’re somewhere in Nebraska and breaks their silence. He brought Bobby back, he mended Dean’s face—he stopped Bela bleeding and didn’t even leave a scar. He isn’t God, but apparently, he’s Heaven’s new sheriff.  
  
“Where’s my grand prize?” Dean asks him, and Bela’s thinking the same damn thing. They did what they were told. They stopped the Apocalypse. They told fate to go fuck itself. Now Sam’s rotting in some hole somewhere and all they seem to have is a free, Godless universe and an empty passenger seat to stare at. Where’s their reward? Where’s their peace?  
  
Castiel meets her eyes in the rear view and stares at her, hard. The same look he’d had months ago—when he’d pressed his hand to her and told her she was important, that she was chosen. He’d never told her why.  
  
They know that Dean was brought back to house Michael. That Sam was protected to house Lucifer. That Bela’s blood was the only thing that could lock the cage. But, really, it could have been anyone. Anyone could have been tied to that rack. Anyone could have cut themselves open and bled onto the ground. As far as all-important destinies go, hers seems pretty lacking in the long run.  
  
“All I got was my brother, in a hole!” Dean’s saying, upfront, but Castiel is still staring right at her and Bela feels the same way she did back then. Like he knows too much. Way more than he should. And really, there’s only one thing about her that’s worth knowing anymore. But it shouldn’t even be a blip on the new sheriff of Heaven’s radar—aside from its being impossible.  
  
He can’t know. No one knows; only Sam. She told him earlier, once it became pretty apparent that he probably wasn’t ever coming back from this. Back when he was still Sam, with pliable eyes, and good intentions, and a secret love of sweet, sugary coffee syrup. She’d felt bad, piling it on him then. Assuming it would matter at all, stacked against the end of the world and the devil incarnate and an eternity spent in a fiery cage.  
  
But she knew it would matter to Sam. It would probably matter more to him than anyone.  
  
“When all this is over, you get out, you hear me? You and him go and settle down somewhere,” he’d told her. “You go to barbecues and football games and live an apple pie life. You promise me!” She’d nodded, swallowed—begged him not to say anything yet, knew he wouldn’t. He’d make his brother promise blind. And Dean would, because it’s Sam. “And do me a favor. Don’t let him name it something stupid like Samantha or Sammy, okay? He’ll be all high on grief and nostalgia and think it’s a good idea, but for God’s sake, let the curse end with me, huh?”  
  
And she’d laughed, just because he was trying to make her. Because sentiment and tears had nothing to do with it, not really. Destiny had seen to that. “I promise,” she had said.   
  
It’s the only promise she’s ever made her whole life and she doesn’t know if she’ll even get to keep it.  
  
“Some bloody destiny,” Bela mumbles to herself in the back, because in the moment, she’s fucking furious. Furious at Castiel, at God. Furious on Dean’s behalf—he’s sitting there a fucking martyr with his little brother trapped in the pit. The car falls silent, because they know that she’s right. No Heaven, no Hell, just much of the same. That’s what they’d fought for—that’s what Sam had died for.   
  
It had seemed like a lot at the time.  
  
“Sometimes,” Castiel says to the car—Bela rolls her eyes, braces herself for another summon, another peace offering, another shiny white lie, “when we think that our destiny is lacking—” He turns, pins Bela with a stare that seems to go right through her, “—it only means that it hasn’t really begun.”  
  
He’s gone in a blink. No gust, no shadow—Dean catches her eyes in the mirror and gives her a puzzled frown. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”  
  
She wants to say she doesn’t know, but she has a sickening feeling that she might.   
  
“You, Bela Talbot, are more important to this Earth than you realise,” Castiel had said, and he’d looked right through her—never told her why.   
  
Except that maybe he had, all along. She’d just been listening too hard. Maybe she only had to pay attention to where he had rested his hand. _  
  
:::::  
  
Sam stops reading, pauses as he flips the pages back, scans the text again.  
  
“That’s it, that’s all it says,” he announces to the room, and Bela’s lips twitch. Every book, every time. “What do you think? Sixty-six seals—shouldn’t be that hard, right?”  
  
Dean’s crossing the room, three mugs clutched between his fingers. Coffee run—it’s how they operate, she’s learning. Sarcasm and teasing, jibes and occasionally punches—they’re brothers, really, before they’re hunters. It shows all the time.  
  
“Oh yeah.” Dean slides one of the cups beside Sam’s laptop. “Defeat the devil, fulfil our destiny, save the world.” A mug is slid beside her hand and she looks away from the cards. Dean’s lingering beside her shoulder, and there’s black coffee in his cup. “Should be a piece of cake.”  
  
::::::  
  
 _“Kylie?”  
  
“No.”  
  
They fight about names. It shouldn’t surprise her; they’ve fought about everything else. It takes two months to sell Bela’s apartment in Queens. While they wait, they spend three weeks arguing about states, another two arguing about neighbourhoods—they nearly draw blood picking a house. It’s neither of their first choices, in the end: Iowa, because they’re bone-tired of yelling and it’s the state they’re sitting in when the baby kicks. They buy a house and fill it with crap—sofas, coffee machines, queen-sized beds—things that Bela had taken seriously, once upon a time. Now they’re just not-quite-fancy table dressings, but families have houses and houses have crap in them.   
  
“Nathan?”   
  
“I don’t think so.”  
  
The house isn’t huge—nothing she would have slept in three years ago—but it has two pretty nice bedrooms. She leaves the littlest one whitewashed and empty and finds Dean standing in it two months after they move in. She props herself up against the door frame, raises an eyebrow. “What are you doing?”   
  
“Why haven’t you painted in here yet?”   
  
Her hand twitches instinctively towards the subtle hardening of her belly, but she clenches it by her side instead. They don’t make a habit of drawing attention to it; she drapes it in baggy fabric, and they talk about it in the third person. It’s still pretty new, even five months in, and it’s taking even longer to slide into this life than either of them would like.   
  
“Because we don’t know what it is yet.”   
  
He stands stoically for a second more and then turns, brushes past her without looking at her face; his eyes are like stone. “We’re not having a nursery.” The set to his voice tells her there’ll be no arguments about this one. She thinks it’s hilarious, really, that with destiny discarded, she finds other people making most of the decisions for her.   
  
“Hunter?”  
  
“You’re hilarious.”  
  
One of the secretaries in her office gave her a baby book as a gift—even though she hadn’t asked for one, or needed one, or even told anyone yet that the huge lump under her blouse meant she was pregnant. She had left it in front of Bela’s computer with a Post-It on top: “Congrats, Mommy!” Bela stared at it for a second and then called Dean in a blind panic, pulling him off the construction site and scaring him half to death. “I’m going to be a mother!”  
  
He doesn’t say “duh,” but it’s heartily implied.  
  
When he gets home, she slams the book against his chest and glares at him.  
  
“We’re supposed to pick a name.” It’s number three on the “Things to do when you’re expecting” list on the first page of the book. There isn’t a “What to do when you weren’t expecting this” section. Bela checked.   
  
Dean had offered up Sammy and then looked insulted when Bela laughed in his face.   
  
It’s a boy, she’s pretty sure. The woman at the medial centre smiled goofily and told her it was her mother’s intuition, but Bela doesn’t think sixth sense comes into it when the odds are already fifty-fifty. They don’t check whether or not she’s right; Dean doesn’t want to know. Don’t ask, don’t tell—it’s what their relationship was founded on, after all. And it’s not like they have a nursery to paint.   
  
“Savannah?” She looks sideways at Dean’s disbelieving expression and then slams the stupid book shut with a disgruntled sigh.   
  
She’s never put much stock in names. If someone had told Abby Talbot that at twenty-seven, she’d be sitting in her living room arguing about baby names, she wouldn’t have believed them. Some people are just never meant to be parents. She always thought she was one of them.   
  
“Okay. I’m going to open this book and point to a name—and that will be it. Agreed?”  
  
They’ve never done things by the book. They still have no idea what they’re doing, really. They’re still shaken and terrified—stumbling blind. But they’re trying, they’re doing okay. Sam believed they could do it.  
  
She shuts her eyes, cracks the book, and jabs her finger. Dean leans over her shoulder to get a closer look.  
  
“Elijah?” She stares at the name, feels it settle on her tongue. Behind her, Dean shrugs.   
  
“It’s better than Blake and Diego.”   
  
Call it mother’s intuition—call it sheer relief they’ve finally agreed on something—but she thinks he might just be right. Elijah.   
  
She supposes it’ll do. _  
  
:::::  
  
“So what d’you say?” He glances down at her, raises an eyebrow. “You up for shooting destiny right in the keister?”   
  
She rolls her eyes, picks up her cup to hide her smirk. “Destiny’s a little out of my range at the moment—but I’d be up for shooting you, if you like?”  
  
Bobby chortles from the kitchen and Dean narrows his eyes and walks off.   
  
There’s hot tea in the mug and as she lifts it to her lips, she smells honey. 


End file.
